Hegemony: Rome - Wars of ancient sheep

I found it quite funny in Hegemony Gold that the AI only ever seem to fight over sheep and never try to invade enemy cities or forge alliances of their own to combat rising empires. I just wanted to know how the AI in Hegemony Rome would behave. Will they actually try to take your cities and other faction's cities as well as strategic locations? It would be a great feature to add into an already good game to make it excellent.

I understand that it may be necessary to keep the balance within the game but I think that if a faction becomes too powerful, they should have to deal with problems such as rebellion as well as alliances being forged to stop their empire.

I also think factions should attack you depending on the degree of hostility. If they are more hostile towards another faction then they should attack that faction more. You could even manipulate factions to weaken strong factions as you build power yourself and play them against each other like Caesar did. As the faction's power increases then factions should become more hostile towards that faction.

I might be asking a bit too much but I would like to see something along those lines.

Yes, the AI is now capable of being more offensive. The way we're currently setting up the sandbox, you get to pick different "attitudes" for each faction, and one of the options is offensive. That way, for instance, you could set up a war between Rome and Britannia, and leave all the factions in-between as cannon fodder.

That sounds like a cool idea. I've actually had some pretty good experiences in Sandbox mode with the AI launching a nice offensive or two, but there should be a lot more of that. It makes for a fun game, that's for sure.

Whatever you end up doing with the AI, please, please, please don't let it cheat. That's a deal-breaker for me (and probably a lot of others as well). For example, do not allow the AI to see through the fog of war. An easy AI upgrade right off the bat would be to have it merge its units with leaders, which it doesn't do now. Even if it did so ineptly, doing it poorly is still better than not doing it at all. But please don't resort to cheating. I'd rather have the game too easy, if it came down to that.

The AI in gold will launch attacks to take back it's own cities that you've captured, or they might capture an undefended city in a raid, but they won't go after cities controlled by other AIs or cities you've taken from other AIs.

As far as cheating, we're doing everything we can to ensure the AI is playing with the same rules as the player. You'll actually be able to track the general progress of the other AIs in the new graphs window so that you can see how you're doing compared to them in terms of resources, military and infrastructure.

Regarding the fog of war, I'll admit this is a bit of a special case for the AI. Unfortunately, it would be too expensive to track fog of war for all the AIs with the same detail as the player. However, unlike people who can quickly spot an enemy across the entire map, the AI is only aware of what we tell them too look at and we can approximate their fog of war by limiting that range to the vicinity of their units.

And with generals, the AI in Rome will use them the same way the player will. Technically, the AI in Gold can use their Generals but I'll admit it isn't working as well as it should. Some of this was on purpose as AI generals have perma-death we didn't want them to throw them away on nothing, but I expect there also may be a bug or two. Unfortunately, AI changes are prone to unforeseen side effects and so we decided to work on improving this in Rome rather than making further changes to Gold.

Maybe make perma death only when the homecity of said general is captured? Otherwise let them use the generals like you do? I mean perhaps it would make the AI a bit too strong, but maybe at least having them march against troops who are a threat to their city. Like if you're a few miles away and the AI wants to rally their troops to defend their city outside of the walls, then include generals and if they "die" then just make them "be hurt" and returned to the city, which also seems to make sense since the city isn't that far away. Of course I have no idea how this would affect the balance of the game.

In Gold, I didn't see the AI use a general even once, except for the story parts.